(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording apparatus for recording broadcast digital signals representing programs.
(2) Description of Related Art
Conventionally, broadcast digital signals representing programs are recorded by a recording apparatus so that the programs which are represented by the digital signals can be watched at a time other than when the digital signal is broadcast. Programs may be referred to in other documents as events, and are what a user would conventionally refer to as a television program. For example, an episode of “Friends” would be one program, and an episode of “Top Gear” would be another program.
Many programs are now broadcast more than once, such that a program which has been recorded may be subsequently repeated at a different time and/or on a different television channel (a television channel in this sense being the same as what may be referred to in other documents as a service, e.g. BBC1 is one television channel and BBC2 is another television channel). Furthermore, the broadcast digital signal representing the repeated program may have one or more different attribute from the originally broadcast digital signal representing the program. For example, the first broadcasting of the program may have been in standard definition and a subsequent broadcast may be in high definition.
It may be that the user of the recording apparatus would prefer to watch the repeated version of the program, either as well as or instead of the originally broadcast version of the program, because of the different attributes. For example, in the above example, it may be that the user would prefer to watch a high definition version of the program, rather than the standard definition version of the program.
This requires the user to firstly look through the schedules of all of the available channels in order to see if a program is due to be repeated, and if it is, to check if any of the attributes of the digital signal representing the scheduled program are preferable to the same attributes of the digital signal representing the recorded program. If the user then decides to record the digital signal representing the scheduled program, it is necessary to either set the recording apparatus to record it, or to remember to record it when it is subsequently broadcast.
It may be that some or all of the information required to perform the above process is not directly available to the user. Furthermore, it is necessary for the user to repeat the process on a regular basis in order to check new programs as they appear in the scheduling window. This process is both time consuming and likely to result in errors due to the large quantity of data that needs to be manually processed by the user.